Trump yet to master role of commander in chief midway through term
Retired Marine says he doesn’t think the president ‘understands the proper use and role of the military’
He canceled a trip to a cemetery in France where American soldiers from World War I are buried. He did not go to the observance at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day. He has not visited U.S. troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.
And shortly after becoming commander in chief, President Donald Trump asked so few questions in a briefing at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. that top military commanders cut the number of prepared PowerPoint slides to three — they had initially planned 18 — said two officials with knowledge of the visit.
The commanders had slotted two hours for the meeting, but it lasted less than one.
Rhetorically, Trump has embraced the United States’ 1.3 million active-duty troops as “my military” and “my generals” and has posted on Twitter that under his leadership, the U.S. armed forces will be “the finest that our Country has ever had.” But top Defense Department officials say that Trump has not fully grasped the role of the troops he commands, nor the responsibility that he has to lead them and protect them from politics.
“There was the belief that over time, he would better understand, but I don’t know that that’s the case,” said Col. David Lapan, a retired Marine who served in the Trump administration in 2017 as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t think that he understands the proper use and role of the military and what we can, and can’t, do.”
On Friday, Trump conceded that he was wrong not to go to Arlington this week, saying he figured he had covered it by going to another American cemetery in Paris after skipping the first one.
“In retrospect, I should have and I did last year and I will virtually every year,” he told Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” in an interview to air this weekend. “But we had come in very late at night, and I had just left, literally, the American cemetery in Paris, and I really probably assumed that was fine. And I was extremely busy because of affairs of state — doing other things.”
In fact, he did not go to Arlington on Veterans Day last year — he was in Asia at the time — but he has gone to the military cemetery for Memorial Day twice. And on Thursday, he made a pre-Thanksgiving visit to the Marine Barracks in Washington, home of the Marine commandant and units assigned to ceremonial and security missions in the capital. He spent less than an hour, then returned to the White House to briefly address a group of veterans.
“I think the vets, maybe more than anybody else, appreciate what we are doing for them,” Trump said.
On Wednesday, it was Defense Secretary Jim Mattis who visited U.S. troops on the border with Mexico in the latest military deployment under Trump’s watch. Mattis traveled to Base Camp Donna in Texas, where he met with troops who have been webbing concertina wire to keep out acaravan of migrants the president has likened to an “invasion.”
Military perspective
Pentagon officials have privately derided the deployment of nearly 6,000 active-duty troops as a morale killer and an expensive waste of time and resources. The troops, who are providing only logistical support, will be there until Dec. 15.
“It’s always better to come down and see it for real,” Mattis said in talking with troops.
Like two recent former presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Trump came to office without having served in the military. Former President George W. Bush served in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War but never left the country, and questions were raised about how often he reported for duty. All three had complicated relationships with the armed forces.
Trump, who received a deferment from Vietnam because of bone spurs in his heel, came to office with a reverence for the idea of the military. He followed through by appointing generals as defense secretary, White House chief of staff and twice as national security adviser.
But unlike past Republican presidents, Trump has seen little value in the long U.S. deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and other conflicts. He considers them a waste of money and lives and has told advisers that the people in the countries where troops are stationed are not really friends of the United States.
One reason he has not visited troops in war zones, according to his aides, is that he does not really want U.S. troops there in the first place. To visit, they said, would validate missions he does not truly believe in.
‘Deeply disturbed’
His decision days before the midterm elections to send troops to respond to what he insisted was a crisis at the southwestern border remains of deep concern to Defense Department officials.
“If a president routinely and cynically leverages our nation’s armed forces for short-term political advantage, the professional ethos” of the officers corps will be degraded, said Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired three-star Army general and a former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “This, in turn, would threaten one of the foundational principles of our republic — that our military must remain outside of politics.”
At one point during Mattis’ visit to the border Wednesday, a soldier asked him the goals of the mission. “Short term, get the obstacles in,” the defense secretary replied. “Long term, it is somewhat to be determined.”
Trump has also alarmed Defense Department officials with seemingly off-the-cuff remarks.
In April, the president told reporters that “it’s time” to bring U.S. forces home from Syria — an announcement that stunned the Pentagon, Defense Department officials said, because Syria was at the heart of the battle against the Islamic State and a linchpin to Trump’s national security strategy that called for confronting Iran. Leaving Syria would cede ground to Iran and, potentially, Russia. It would also abandon local fighters who have been the United States’ strongest allied ground forces against the Islamic State in Syria.
The response at the Pentagon was a deliberate silence, said Defense Department officials, who anticipated that Trump would not follow up and would instead move on to other topics, which he did.
Yet Trump loves much of the spectacle of commander in chief: cheering troops in a hangar, the tanks and ships and planes, a military parade he proposed for Veterans Day in Washington. He has also boasted repeatedly about securing billions of additional dollars for the Pentagon.
Military officers feel torn between Trump’s efforts to win them the money and being used as political props for speeches that sound more like rallies.
“They like having robust funding for the last year; they like that,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense who turned down a chance at the No. 2 job at the department under Trump. “But I think a lot of military people are deeply disturbed by the degree of partisanship and division.”